Complete Home Designer 5.0: Home Design & Renovation

by Data Becker

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00005U2FW
• Item model number: 20102
• Date first available at Amazon.com: January 18, 2002
• Average Customer Review: 1.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #19,379 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

Let's get the bad news out of the way first: Complete Home Designer 5.0: Home Design and Renovation tends to crash--a lot! It is tough to learn and has a counterintuitive interface. Intended to allow users to explore housing designs and renovation possibilities, this package definitely requires time and patience. However, users familiar with home design software will already know that many of the packages on the market fail--at least to some extent--to make it easy to create and experiment with a home. Room placement remains a chore in Complete Home Designer, certainly, but no more so than in comparable programs. In fact, those users willing to do the painstaking work of re-creating their real-world home or designing a new one will be pleased to find several imagination-friendly features, including the means to fine-tune irregular and L-shaped rooms and the ability to build homes with as many as 10 floors.

The good news is that the number of sample homes that can be created with the design wizard is pleasingly varied and variable, allowing a high degree of customization even in the blueprint stage. For those who want to play with decorating ideas for a fairly expensive home with no regard to specific layout, these samples can provide hours of entertainment and lots of design ideas. What's more, the gallery of objects--furniture and other décor items--is satisfyingly large. Control over size, orientation, and placement of these objects is again cumbersome and again worth the effort. Complete Home Designer tries hard to make the objects workable. The result? You are somewhat less likely to have to stretch a coffee table to bizarre proportions just to make it work next to other furnishings. More importantly, when you are done, the rooms you have created look remarkably like places where real people might choose to live.

Complete Home Designer 5.0: Home Design and Renovation also has all the standard features for software of this type--you can make a short video tour of completed homes, import photographs of people and furnishings, animate images within the home, and do limited landscaping. Users with lots of time to devote to learning the program's eccentricities and designing the home of their dreams will find, ultimately, that this program offers all the tools they could want... at least until the overall standard for home design software reaches a new level. --Alyx Dellamonica

Amazon.com Product Description

Complete Home Designer 5.0: Home Design & Renovation includes 12 fully integrated tools for every home project, including construction, renovation, redecorating, expansion, and landscaping. Get started immediately with the six-step building process for small or large home projects. See your ideas come to life--from plan drawings to fully rendered 3-D perspectives. You can even experience your designs with real-time walkthrough movies, complete with ultra-realistic lighting and shadowing.

Start building with the auto-construction function, giving you millimeter-perfect measurements for accurate dimensions of frames, floors, and walls in standard or metric. The Floor Plan Pro feature lets you choose a predefined floor plan or scan and import a custom design. Click and drag windows, skylights, doors, and siding, or change the color of your home. Build a deck or balcony onto your home and easily add railings.

You can do interior design as well. Redecorate the master bedroom, update your kitchen, or experiment with hardwood floors. Quickly create basic layouts and add a room with a click of the mouse. The Furniture Gallery lets you select from thousands of furniture items and accessories, or create your own using the 3-D Furniture Workshop.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

102 of 104 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Quirky, but well worth the effort, February 1, 2002

By 

Luis P. Gutierrez (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Complete Home Designer 5.0: Home Design & Renovation (CD-ROM)

I have been using Complete Home Designer 4.0 and decided to upgrade to 5.0 a few months ago, and I am not disappointed! First of all, don't expect a no-brainer interface and don't think that an architect will necessarily be able to build what you've designed. This software is less about structural design (there aren't that many low-price programs that can handle that aspect) than it is about visualization. If you want to see your designs beautifully rendered, this is the program to use. Shadows and lighting are rendered very realistically and you can simulate light conditions of virtually any time of day as well as choose geographic locations. The new structural features in this version include polygonal free roof design - where there is virtually no limit to the complex roofs you can design, and a customized window designer. These, to me, are the two biggest advantages over the previous version. Whereas most home design software available is limited to three floors, Complete Home Designer 5.0 gives you up to ten, so you can design your dream apartment house if you want! There is a large library of furnishings and details you can add to your design and some additional objects are available for download on the Internet. As I intimated in the title, there are a few quirks in the program. The parent program on which this is based originated in Germany, so you will find some pop-up windows and menu items are labeled in German and not in English! This is odd but doesn't really interfere with the program itself. Also, the program crashes occasionally. This too is annoying but the program is set to automatically backup whatever you're working on every minute or so, so you can usually recover your file and pick up where you left off. If you want to have fun designing buildings as a hobby or want to get a great visual preview of a house project before consulting an architect and don't mind a somewhat steep learning curve, I would recommend this program.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Just plain bad, April 13, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Complete Home Designer 5.0: Home Design & Renovation (CD-ROM)

Installed this software hoping to visualize possible deck designs for my house. I use a brand new really powerful computer. This software crashed so much I couldn't get through the process of building a model of my home design, much less dream up new deck designs for it.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Tough to use, March 23, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Complete Home Designer 5.0: Home Design & Renovation (CD-ROM)

Complete Home Designer lets you enter room dimensions, one room at a time, and then place the room on the grid. Placing the room on the grid is the trick. It is very difficult to locate room 2 with respect to room 1. As you try to move it, the dimensions change and the location changes with it. You get into an unending loop of moving and resizing. If you ever get your layout correct, the program dimensions the rooms very nicely, if a little clumsily. I never got much further because it took too much effort to get a simple plan entered.